Sinéad Murphy
The University of Sunderland is promoting ‘masterclasses’ in’ Menopause in the Workplace.’The advertisement has been working on Smooth Radio, a station under the umbrella of Global– one of the alarmingly couple of business megaliths with increasing command over our airwaves, our money streams and our veins.
The advertisement is voiced in an on-the-brink-of-laughter style that is growing common in public shipment of all kinds. In more rational times, it would connote a teetering on the edge of reason. Now it is the default tone no matter how serious the agenda it serves. Listen to Kate Garraway or to Myleene Klass, two International stalwarts, and you will hear it.
So-called ‘vocal fry’ caught girls’s voices about ten or fifteen years ago, remaking them as barely discernible drawls with overtones of whiskey-soaked inertia. Now, having actually been through this prism of jadedness, women are speaking of the little that remains to be animated about as if it is the most interesting, the most amusing event or experience ever, to be promoted in declamatory pleasure and couched in a small variety of vacuous expressions–‘I love that!’; ‘How incredible!’
But back to the ‘masterclasses’ in ‘Menopause in the Office,’ brayed about with nothing-to-see-here-folks inanity in the airspace of cartoon-villain, Global.
Ladies in all offices are defiled by this advertisement, by the ‘masterclasses’ that it describes, and by the milieux in which such possibilities are abroad as not just acceptable but at the lead of progressiveness and inclusivity.
The principle of ‘Menopause in the Workplace’ plays an old technique. It takes the name of one element of a friend of people and utilizes it to stand in for the entire of that cohort of human beings. Menopause can not go to work. Menopause does not visit or clock in or set to. Menopause is not in the office. Females are.
Perhaps a few of these women are going through menopause. However one does not refer to and administer ‘Menopause in the Work environment’ without effacing the women to whom this experience may or does apply and replacing their humanness with one of their qualities.
This old trick has a name: metonymy, calling a part to refer to the whole. And it has a dubious history, most infamously in using ‘hands’ to designate industrial employees. Its result is to weaken the complex wholeness that makes up humanness and thus to clear the way for attitudes and behaviour that would be less easy to adopt towards completely realized humans.
The University of Sunderland’s ‘masterclass’ in ‘Menopause in the Office’ is a workout in the dehumanization of women.metop
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What is more, ‘Menopause in the Workplace’ goes beyond the dehumanizing effect of utilizing ‘hands’ to describe employees, and in ways that are revealing of basic aspects of the mode of control of people that defines those societies such as ours that are quick ending up being dystopian technocracies.
Our hands at least are our own and make things our own. They are like those of others around us, yes, and not infinitely efficient in course. However we do not have the expression, ‘It remains in your hands,’ for no reason: our hands provide to each people the methods of identifying elements of our lives in essential ways, of forming our lives, of bringing ourselves to bear upon the world and those in it. Lots of hands make easy work, however a single pair of hands makes the world in an important sense ours. When our hands are connected, it is this autonomy that is scandalously in abeyance.
For this factor, the dehumanizing program that referred to employees as ‘hands’ included within it the ingredients of its defeat– for all that the conditions to which it consigned people were degrading, it also recommended an effective mode of their release. Quit working. Down tools. Idle hands. The decrease of humans to factory and farm ‘hands’ suggested the means of forcing the admission that ‘hands’ are humans after all.
Not so with our updated version of metonymy, which substitutes one or other health category for a set of human beings and of which The University of Sunderland’s usage of ‘menopause’ is rather normal:
To start with, ‘menopause’ is pegged, in manner ins which are practically climatic, to the most banal of human experiences, such as fatigue and irritability. In this method, it is all over and no place, the most familiar of conditions it appears that can be talked about with practically anybody and yet not to be isolated, monitored, determined. Our hands, by contrast, while likewise quite regular and daily are ideal prior to our eyes, as plain as the nose on our face, not strange, not amorphous, and therefore not in the mode of irreversible escape.
Second of all, ‘menopause’ is characterised as a biochemical phenomenon that occurs to us and is beyond our control, to be understood and administered only by organizations and their specialists. For this factor, its common-or-garden familiarity is accompanied by a rarefied scientific technicality, the really opposite of familiar, beyond the understanding of any however those started into the appropriate procedures and items. ‘Menopause’ is for this reason essentially beyond our grasp (a metaphor that is tellingly reliant on the understanding available to us through our hands).
Finally, ‘menopause’ collectivises, rushing through us in a way that does not aggregate our individuality as ‘hands’ does however liquifies it, disappearing each and every lady in between the ages of 25 and 60 into the mound of information that comprises what we call ‘populations,’ the dominant things of state-sponsored programmes of all kinds, consisting of health programs.
‘Menopause,’ like all its health-label kind, is not in our hands. Quite the contrary. It works to remove possibilities for autonomy, self-direction, understanding.
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There is one last thing to be observed about the use of health-labels to alternative to human beings, which reveals it to have a vital role in the trespassing paradigm of our troubling times. While ‘factory hands’ attended to the body as potent and needing to be harnessed, ‘Menopause in the Office’ addresses the human body as weak and requiring to be handled.
This framing of the body as ailing and in need of being bolstered fits the epochal shift that we are enduring, from the discipline and exploitation of humans as employees to the control and pacification of human beings as users, efficient of nothing, implicitly surplus, useless.
The rebranding of people as ‘worthless eaters’ is still a background hum in modern rearrangements of social and political life, however it has its more appropriate variations, which are repeated at us often enough for there to be seeded now a basic sense that we people are intruders on our own land, whose best hope is to be endured to remain here.
Talk of our ‘footprint’ is quite usual in the most mainstream channels, although it presents us as awkward marauders on the earth’s delicate sands and implicitly supports the depopulation program that is clearly at stake in the continuous stream of information we are exposed to about just how much we take in and how much we discharge. Contribute to this the incessant promotion of AI in every aspect of life, and you have the not-yet-explicit growing acceptance that the human body is somehow regrettable and can be done effectively without.
It turns out that the metaphorical relocation that uses health categories such as ‘menopause’ to describe the people who experience them works to co-opt us to a fight that is really being waged against us, encouraging us to hold our bodies in contempt, to be troubled by our corporeal nature, and to agree, to demand even, that our bodies be handled, boosted, reengineered, compensated, taken out of play entirely.
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This advancing contempt for human bodies is rather obviously not a ‘ladies’s concern,’ impacting as it does upon ladies and males and kids in equivalent measure.
Take the recent example of health-metonymy to which we were all outrageously subject, when humans everywhere, young and old, healthy and infirm, were reclassified as ‘Covid cases.’ This dehumanized every one people in specifically the way that ‘Menopause in the Workplace’ dehumanizes adult females.
Like ‘menopause,’ Covid recorded in its internet a seemingly limitless variety of the most innocuous experiences, reinterpreted as signs and therefore made objectionable– tiredness, pains and pains, coughing, sneezing, and, best of all, absolutely nothing at all (‘asymptomatic Covid’).
Yet, like ‘menopause,’ Covid also required the most elaborate and institutionally approved interventions, from lockdowns to the unlimited administering of laboratory PCR tests, to ventilators, to experimental MRNA injections. And like ‘menopause,’ Covid collectivized so totally that the trope of the herd became the most proper, dissolving the specific into a narrative of togetherness that made people prepared individuals in the effacement of their own wellness and that of those dearest to them.
Lastly, just like ‘menopause,’ Covid reframed the body as so weak, despicable, degraded that it was constantly and everywhere to be presumed, and masked, distanced, tested, separated, jabbed and improved to infinity.
With the subsiding of the Covid category, others are regaining traction. ‘Neurodiversity’ too remains in the office, ‘sexuality’ is in schools, and ‘disability’ everywhere we turn, not to discuss ‘dependency,’ ‘cancer,’ ‘diabetes,’ and ‘heart problem.’ Metonymy is going from strength to strength to put it simply, effacing our humanity with our so-called ‘health.’ And the infrastructure is being put in location, as the patched street furniture of Covid gives way to a more carefully coordinated vision for ‘healthy high streets’ on which defibrillators are emerging like pustules and screening clinics appearing simply where you least anticipate them.
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Nevertheless, for all that there is nothing ‘females’s concern’ about the roll-out of health as an effacement of our mankind, ‘menopause’ is an intriguing case. Not just due to the fact that it is amongst the loudest being advertised, but since it seamlessly continues a health-crusade against probably the earliest of the ‘ineffective eaters’: females in the Victorian home, with the means for servants to keep their home and their children. These women were not ‘hands’ and not ‘suits.’ They were– a brand-new possibility, generated by the development of efficiency as the prime metric of commercial societies– just unproductive, with neither employment nor independence from it.
These early ‘useless eaters’ became the item of a recently expanded range of health categories, bound up with their embodiment in the most ordinary ways and yet based on the ministrations of brand-new fields of expertise. Their pregnancies reclassified as ‘confinements,’ their inevitable apathy at being shut away with Victorian rigour was called ‘hysteria,’ or ‘fatigue,’ or just ‘nerves,’ for which complete rest was often recommended. Lockdown, by another name.
And there was facilities too. Not ‘healthy high streets’ but healthy houses, kept dark and quiet so as not to disturb and generously provided with what we have actually because named as the ‘passing out sofa,’ for females to collapse upon, or, if still conscious, to recline upon with their lapdog, vial of narcotic within reach.
Jane Austen composed at the cusp of the look of these pitiable ladies, prior to they were so fully instated that they lost their salience. Astute as she was, Austen saw how they were being played. Her response is useful:
“Beware of fainting-fits … A frenzy fit is not one quarter so pernicious; it is an exercise to the body and if not too violent, is, I attempt say, conducive to health in its effects– Run mad as often as you choose; but do not faint.”Love and Relationship, 1790
To ladies, I would say this: ‘Menopause’ is our fainting sofa. We nestle into its comforts when we are in each other’s business, and its anaesthetising effects are palpable. But to enjoy its alleviations is to be immunised, not against its so-called symptoms (‘I’m just nuts,’ ‘Such brain-fog’) but versus the conditions of our lives that make us nuts and foggy: precariousness all over, distanced living, fractured communities …
To rage against these real persecutions is to stand out, to be ‘severe,’ to run mad, however much better that than collapsing onto the dubious supports being prepared for us. Run mad as typically as you select; however do not faint.
Sinéad Murphy is author of Effective History (Northwestern, 2010), The Art Kettle (No, 2012) and Zombie University (Repeater, 2017), and co-editor of Pandemic Action and the Expense of Lockdowns (Routledge 2022).
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